We all know the problem: Fake accounts with dubious homepage URLs, guestbooks full of spam and every 3 minutes a new spam comment via trackback. While some think that captchas are a soultion, others throw in, that good captchas are an obstacle for users and bad captchas are not means against the OCR features of the latest spam bot generation.
But how can you deal with this flood of vigra ads and homepages advertising exotic sex?
Already some months ago Mark West tested the Akismet spam protection suite. It was included into the CVS-version of EZComments and worked quite nicely. But the spam detector is a feature that many modules need. So it has now become a module of its own. It's not yet ready, but I hope it will be soon available for inclusion into guestbooks, comments, forums ASO.
A module that Mark West released yesterday is "Bad Behaviour". "Bad Behavior is a PHP-based solution for blocking link spam and the robots which deliver it.
Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site’s load down, makes your site logs cleaner, and can help prevent denial of service conditions caused by spammers." -- Bad Behaviour Homepage
As you include it into the pnAPI.php at earliest possible position, it stops PostNuke loading its higher functions when it detects a spam bot access. This means that all detected access cause only little traffic.
IMHO a combination of Akismet and Bad Behaviour will reduce the amout of spam on our sites without building barriers also for normal users. But we will have to live with spam, if we want to keep up our sites.
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9 Comments so far
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1. vworld wrote on Mar 07, 2007 at 05:14 PM
Thanks for the info -- this will definitely become a very useful module!
2. dennisMe2 wrote on Mar 07, 2007 at 07:44 PM
This all almost sounds too good to be true.
Reminds me of the text on Mulder's poster in the X-Files: "I want to believe"...
No Captcha && No spam wow...
3. kaffeeringe.de wrote on Mar 07, 2007 at 07:46 PM
Not "no spam" - you will always receive spam. But we hope that it might become fewer.
4. chance1376 wrote on Mar 07, 2007 at 08:30 PM
One thing you do have to watch for on Bad Behavior at least the version built into net query is some users will get hit with blacklisted IP addresses. My home IP address is on the black list and I can't get my ISP to do anything about it so I just switch it on and off as I need to post stories or what ever trips Bad Behavior. But other than that it does a wonderful job catching spam bots.5. kaffeeringe.de wrote on Mar 08, 2007 at 09:36 AM
Could it be that someone uses your home PC for the distribution of spam?
6. chance1376 wrote on Mar 08, 2007 at 07:17 PM
No the computer is clean and after doing some looking around it was blacklisted before I ended up with the IP address. It should be getting close to the time where I end up with a new one and hopefully that one is good.
7. dean_at_ourspot wrote on Mar 11, 2007 at 07:41 PM
quite timely, as I just trimmed 4500+ spam comments from one of my sites, and and highly frustrated with its continued activity.
I'm of the understanding that 90% of this traffic could be avoided with the inclusion of noref. it would be nice if that could be a sys level option, maybe module level. in the mean time, does anyone know how it could be easily and transparently added into a site? I was thinking (and still researching) of a .htaccess function, possibly a mod rewrite thing, but was hoping to find something a bit more ..."refined?"
8. kaffeeringe.de wrote on Mar 12, 2007 at 02:10 PM
There's a NoFollow-Hook in the NOC.9. dean_at_ourspot wrote on Mar 12, 2007 at 08:56 PM
the no follow hook is a great help, thank you!